Though it loses some of its spectacle charm in the process, the audio adaptation of Kaki King's guitar showcase still bursts with masterclass talent.

The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body

Ever since her debut in 2001, Georgian instrumentalist Katherine Elizabeth King (stage name Kaki King) has made leaps and bounds in defining what it is to play a guitar. Essentially taking the role of a one-woman band by the horns, King has defined herself not only as simply one of the best guitarists that the world may have ever come to know, but one of the most interestingly ingenious innovators of music at large. Previously described as an “ontological tabula rasa” in representing a story of creation, King’s latest project, The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, accentuates the guitar as a shape-shifter, gliding across genres such as jazz, shoegazing, Latin roots, and heavy alternative rock across about an hour’s worth of a spectacle unlike any other.

Starting out as a grassroots project on Kickstarter, support for King ended up blowing through the roof, with $43,091 ultimately being raised to fund it, hatching a visual and musical experience across multiple forms of media, including a live showing. Without the chromatic shell casing of the actual visual experience, a partial amount of the charm is lost in King’s audio release of The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, but ultimately her skillful and thought-provoking compositions still shine through just as well as they would have over a video and audio setup.

The ominous and appropriately titled “In the Beginning” sets the scene for The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body on an almost uncharacteristically discreet tone for King, given the bombastic nature of her previous release Glow's opener, “Great Round Burn”. But The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body is a completely different piece of artwork altogether, and King is a masterful virtuoso of the musical persuasion, being capable of letting the pieces fall where they may in a futuristic, avant-garde, and almost electronic arrangement such as “In the Beginning” and letting it transition effortlessly into the experimental jazz track “Thoughts Are Born”. There is a bit of an admitted downfall in only hearing the expert picking and unconventionally magisterial beats and scratches that make up the latter track given the mesmerizing visual experience that King had also prepared for her audience, but it’s a “better than nothing” scenario of the highest caliber.

King then brings listeners through an aural dreamscape with a light Spanish flair in the retrospective “Notes and Colours” before transitioning into the more sequestrated “Oobleck”. It is meant to be said that it’s only sequestrated in name, since oobleck is a non-Newtonian fluid that’s both liquid and solid to the touch depending on how you approach it. Give it a good punch and the fluid appears solid, but slide your hand gently into it, and it’s totally liquid. The same applies to King’s composition, which accentuates the hefty nature of the bassy ethereal backing instrumentation to the methodical and elegant airiness of her fingerpicking. Things really reach their height on the two-piece composition “Trying to Speak”, featuring New York string quartet ETHEL (also featured in Glow) before calming down in the everything-falls-into-place retrospective and album closer, “We Did Not Make the Instrument, the Instrument Made Us”.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.